In his work, Jack Cole certainly appears to have had certain unconscious dark obsessions. It's these very obsessions, combined with a wildly inventive mind, and a stunning talent for creating visual images that are the foundation of Cole's greatness, both as the creator of Plastic Man stories and as the signature Playboy cartoonist. We see evidence of all these elements, perhaps in their most potent form, in today's "Dark Plas" Halloween post, " The Witch of Wailing Woods," a little-known, mostly overlooked story from Plastic Man #42 (July, 1953).

The story, like many of Cole's later Plastic Man adventures, is built around a beautiful evil woman. In this case, Cole offers us a gorgeous raven-haired witch named Zelda, clad in a fetching dress that splays the black strands of a spider and its web across her perfectly-formed breasts.

The more I look at this story, the more impressed I am with it. Jack Cole's last comic book is among his best, in my opinion -- although it is a far cry from the zany screwball antics for which Cole is best-known. It may be this puzzling and extreme shift in tone that accounts for why these Cole stories remain largely undiscovered and certainly unappreciated by his fans.

From Plastic Man 43

Admittedly, Cole's last comic book stories, from 1952-54 are dark, twisted, and disturbing -- put simply, they are not nearly as much fun to read as his humor-based work. Why did Jack Cole, a guy who did humor comics so well and so successfully, step into the dark world of monsters, death, dismemberment, and pure evil?

Perhaps Cole and his editors at Quality Comics were attempting to keep pace with the breaking trend of horror comics, led by E.C. with titles like Haunt of Fear and Tales From the Crypt. It's one way to explain why Cole and Quality took a character deeply rooted in humor and slapstick and recast him into one supernatural horror story after another. In the issue that comes after the one in which this witch story appears, Plastic Man and Woozy battle a vampire.

At the same time Plas and Woozy fought witches, werewolves, and vampires in the pages of the last Plastic Man comics Cole drew, Quality also brought out a new horror title, the sinister-sounding Web of Evil. The star artist at Web of Evil... Jack Cole.

It seems to me that the real story here is not that Cole made such a surprising left-turn from humor to horror in his work, but rather that he did it so well. It's easy to become preoccupied (and repulsed) with the darkness of his last dark comic book stories and miss the extraordinary level of accomplishment in creating sequential graphic narratives that Jack Cole achieved in this work.

Here's a video presentation I've made to analyze and appreciate the splash page of today's story. In looking at this one page alone, we find a high level of design, great inventiveness and craft, and -- of course -- a weirdness and particular shadowy tone unique to Cole's work.

And, without further ado, here's the story. Some notes and observations follow.

Whew! Pretty grim stuff! However, remember, it was in Police Comics 22 that Cole dispenses with a villain by snapping his head in a bear trap.

Upon closer examination, one can find traces of Jack Cole's shadow-side in his earlier work. Given this, it seems to make sense that Cole -- tasked with a new direction from humor to horror -- would be able to embrace it with gusto, as he does in this story, much in the same way Plas embraces the sexy witch.

"The Witch of Wailing Woods" features a woman who is both deeply desirable and extremely deadly. Plastic Man seems drawn to her as a man. He curls around her, extends and grows his body to encircle and embrace her. In one panel, Cole delivers a somewhat tender, sexually charged portrait of Plastic Man and Zelda that resonates with similar panels in his other stories of this period.

Woozy, an incorrigible womanizer, is the very portrait of a man bewitched when he gets close to Zelda. Cole plays it up with a dash of humor and a couple of cartoon sweat drops, but compared to the Tex Avery style wolf takes Cole was drawing just 3 years earlier, this is pretty restrained.

A real witch (and talented), Zelda seems to be able to use a mixture of spells and voodoo to acquire a certain power to control and destroy both people and inanimate objects. She seems motivated to establish a new business model, by selling her services at a premium, as opposed to simply using her powers to get money. She appears to have no empathy at all, and kills two of her henchmen after making them suffer in agony. In others, Zelda, the beautiful sorceress, is as crazy as a bedbug.

Cole -- in his comic book stories, at least -- appears to be both drawn to and oppressed by beautiful women. In one panel, a man writhes on the ground in torture and gasps, "I can't stand it! She's killing me!"

Throughout the story, Cole uses the bright red body of Plastic Man (is that costume his skin, or actual clothes he's wearing?) to direct the eye through his shadow-drenched, inky-black tableaux.

In my video above, I spoke of how Cole created different visual planes and then broke them with vigorous movement through them in the splash page. Consider the smoke and Plas' left arm, which move away from the planes nearest the reader towards the rear planes.

And then the thug-monster's two arms move him the opposite direction, from the rear, to the front. When we step back and look at this composition, we see that all the elements swirl around the central figure of the luscious wicked witch. the smoke curls around her, as does Plastic Man's arm. She is the catalyst of this composition, as she is the catalyst of this story. So, the splash page is symbolic and perfectly in resonance with the story the will follow. This strikes me as pretty sophisticated and accomplished art, in any medium. Cole uses this multi-dimensional, depth-of-field technique in several standout panels within the story itself:

As the story reaches climax (cough cough) Cole makes his panels more dense.

While the story may be somewhat hackneyed and cliche-ridden, and the horrific nature of the visuals may be something of a turn off when one expects to see Cole's funny stuff, I maintain that his last comic books have great merit and encourage all readers to seek them out. I leave you with one of my favorite panels in the story. After drawing Plastic Man in exceptional volume and intensity for over decade, Cole had a unique feel for what a man who had a rubber body would actually look like in our reality, and in this panel, he delivers a beautiful and surprising image, that is both funny and challenging.

This was one of Jack Cole's last Plastic Man stories. It's a shame that, having achieved this high level of expertise, and being so talented, he didn't stay in the field and make more comic book stories.

Somewhat like Plastic Man in this panel, Cole's soul and emotional health may not have been up to its normal resiliency. The field he had worked so hard in for 15 years was rapidly changing and edging him out. Even though he was artistically successful (perhaps more than anyone realized until recently), his shift from humor to horror wasn't doing the trick. Like Plas, he knew he had to do something fast. A few months later, he submitted some gag cartoons to a new men's magazine, called Playboy, and made another virtuoso shift in artistic approach, from horror comics to sexy cartoons. This time, his work was noticed and celebrated -- but sadly, it seemed to make little difference to a man who must have still had the darkness we see in his last comic book stories locked up inside.

Hi Bill, good point that I meant to address in this post. I have talked about the mis-labeling of Cole's last Plastic Man stories in previous posts. I think it's not widely understood yet that Cole at least penciled these stories. My conclusions that this story (and several other Plastic Man stories up to issue 43) are drawn by Jack Cole is based on a very intensive 4-year study of his work. As art spiegelman wrote in his and Chip Kidd's book on Jack Cole, it's sometimes difficult to say when the art is by Cole or one of his assistants, but if the page seems to be brimming with interesting ideas and innovation, then it's probably Cole. That is the case with this story. There's not a doubt in my mind that Cole penciled this story. The inks could very well be Cuidera, Kotzky, or some combo of these guys, or Ward, Cole, and any one of several other artists. But the pencils are Cole -- I am certain. When it comes to Jack Cole, there are several mis-labeled stories in the Grand Comics Database, going back to the earliest years of his career. I spent some time correcting these, but their process is extremely time-consuming, and so I've only gotten to a few things.

The Grand Comics Database is a good idea that's still shambolic. Lots of wrong information, attributions that aren't reliable, and outright guesses remain in its pages. I agree with Paul: this is from Jack Cole's hand as at least partial artist and with some hand in the story's concepts.

The witch Zelda's talk of modernizing her witchcraft, and her idea that by building a scale model of a city, she can use those replicas as architectural voodoo dolls, is right out of Cole's wacky imagination. That these stories soft-pedal the humor elements might cause many to overlook them, or consider them not Cole's efforts. Trust us--it's Cole!

Off topic question (kind of). Does the book "The Pin Up Art of Jack Cole" contain his Playboy work or not? One of the comments on Amazon led me to believe that they weren't in there. If they aren't, have they ever been collected before? What's in that book from the '60s called Playboy Ladies? (or something like that)

This many Jack Cole fans visiting us can't be wrong!

Jack Cole in 1956, creating a cartoon for Playboy - He put a lot of himself into his work.

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Welcome

This blog is dedicated to the study of the work of comic book legend Jack Cole.

Jack Ralph Cole (December 14, 1914 - August 13, 1958) was an American comic book writer and artist, newspaper comic strip creator, and men's magazine cartoonist. He is best-known for creating Plastic Man, which he wrote and drew for nearly a decade. Cole was posthumously inducted into the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1991, and recognized as one of a handful of comics art masters with the 1999 Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame.

Cole's Comics will share rare examples of his work, present in-depth analyses, and hopefully expand on our understanding of the work of one of the great artists of the 20th century. Guest bloggers and comments are welcome!

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I'm a writer, artist, cartoonist, teacher and cultural historian. I live in Seattle with my wife Claire Mack (www.clairemack.com) and our wonderful teens, Reid and Olivia. My business is Presentation Tree (www.presentationtree.com), where I apply content development and graphic design skills to make awesome presentations for a wide range of clients. When I'm not doing that, I enjoy researching, writing, and teaching about the history of comics.

In 2007, blogger Timothy O'Neil published an astute visual analysis of one of Jack Cole's sexy "Jake" cartoons fr...

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